Ever ready to experiment, 76-year-old David Hockney, one of the biggest names in contemporary art, has a new canvas these days: an iPad. Using the Brushes app, he draws on the screen with his finger to form an intently observed landscape, the computer recording every creative move, which he can then see on instant replay.

"I'd never watched myself draw before," Hockney said in an exclusive interview at his Hollywood Hills studio, where a series of large landscape inkjet prints of his charcoal drawings blanketed the walls. "Because when you're drawing, you're always one step ahead, actually.

"Watching myself, when I slow the drawings down, was quite interesting because I could see that I was going all over (the iPad's screen), and all over again. It doesn't change the way I execute a drawing at all, but it was fascinating watching it."

Bay Area residents will get to experience the artist's fascination with his new medium when the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum opens "David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition" on Oct. 26. The de Young is the only venue for this survey of the past dozen years of Hockney's art in all media and will mark the institution's largest exhibition of his works to date.

The de Young event will be the latest milestone in a career that has spanned five decades, starting with Hockney's portrayals of L.A. pretty boys in the 1960s and progressing to his digital experimental landscapes of today.

Gay imagery

Hockney is widely admired in the international art world for his early works' celebration of male desire and for his subsequent restless refusal to become content with a single signature style, medium or technique. His large works have sold for prices in the low seven figures.

His celebrity may one day surpass that of his longtime friend Andy Warhol (1928-1987). Hockney's 2012 exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts attracted more than 650,000 visitors in a run just short of three months, and the shows at all three European venues drew extraordinarily high numbers.

Hockney doesn't particularly look the part of a serious artist. Imagine Bob Newhart, with a full head of blond hair gone to silver, dressed in a paint-streaked gray wool suit and brightly flower-patterned black shirt, wearing half-rimmed glasses and smoking steadily, despite having had a stroke five years ago.

Powerful contributions

Whatever impression the somewhat reclusive Hockney makes, few would dispute his contribution to the contemporary art world.

"All good artists make the world around us seem more complex, interesting and enigmatic than it usually appears," the British art critic Martin Gayford wrote recently. "David Hockney is unusual, however, in the range, boldness and verve of his thinking. ... His abiding preoccupation is what the world looks like and how human beings represent it: people and pictures ... it is a wide question and a deep one."

Hockney, one of five children, was born to working-class parents in the industrial town of Bradford in northern England. He won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, which allowed him to transfer later to the Bradford Regional College of Art. After a stint of community service in a hospital, compensating for the conscientious objection that allowed him to avoid conscription, Hockney enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London, garnering prizes for drawing from the outset, despite wayward study habits.

Rapid rise to fame

His first New York gallery show, in 1964, made Hockney famous almost immediately. His gift for drawing and his suave, spare portraits of family and art-world friends - some with overt or coded gay content - prompted critics to link him with Pop art, a movement that spotlighted everyday objects and desires.

He relocated to Los Angeles in 1966. Like other Pop artists, he sometimes referenced advertising and supermarket goods, but for Hockney, his late friend R. B. Kitaj once wrote, "Los Angeles was about boys."

The rapidly dwindling American prejudice against gay people and Hockney's shifting preoccupations have led many to forget how startling people found his early 1960s portraits of L.A. pretty boys and culturally prominent, "out" gay friends.

But Hockney has moved far away from that time and left those youthful preoccupations behind. He became exceptionally productive for decades in every medium from painting to photography to digital media, and he has enjoyed a strong position in the art market world for 50 years.

"I work every day - Saturdays and Sundays as well," said Hockney, who has two studios in Britain but still spends much of his time in his L.A. home and work space.

"I don't go out much anymore. It's partly my deafness. I can hear you with hearing aids, but it stops me being very social. I've been out three times in the last three months. I don't miss it. I'm perfectly happy working. I work by day, mostly. I'm a day person."

Hockney had his Hollywood Hills studio built in 1983, and it sits above the house on his steep hillside property. The studio site was a tennis court when he bought the place, he said. "I never played tennis, so I built this."

A bit reclusive

Hockney still enjoys living in Los Angeles, "but I've lost a lot of friends here," many to the AIDS epidemic, "and I'm not making new ones. That happens everywhere, I suppose ... but I'm not that easy to get to, and I don't want to be."

Although Hockney is well known in the United States, he is more popular in Britain. A 2011 poll of 1,000 colleagues in his native country named him the most influential British artist in history. He disagrees.

"I don't think I'm that influential an artist," he said. "I've never taught much, for one thing. I taught one year, etching at Maidstone School of Art in 1963. And I was paid 20 pounds for a day, and after six months, I'd forgotten the pay, and I thought, 'I could do without this; I could manage. I'd rather paint all day than go teach etching. If I paint all day, I might earn more money.' And I was right."

Relishes installation

Hockney considers the selection and installation of pieces for his exhibitions part of his work. He said he was looking forward to installing his show in San Francisco.

"We're going to be showing these," he said of the inkjet prints, "because on this scale you can see the drawing, the marks and everything at a distance, where with only one little drawing, only one person can see it at a time."

The de Young exhibition will emphasize two recent themes of his long career.

One is the discovery of the iPhone and iPad and apps that permit him to make drawings in color and play them back from start to finish.

The other will center on what he calls "The Great Wall." This pictorial research archive spanning 28 panels led Hockney to publish a book that ignited a controversy that continues among art authorities. In the 2002 book, "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters," Hockney argued that the projection of images by means of lenses or convex mirrors explains European art's sudden advance from the mid-15th century to the perfection of photo-chemistry in the 19th.

Many people thought Hockney was deflating the achievement of the masters. But, he said, what the old masters "discovered was a law of optics" and "optics don't make marks, they only produce an image, a look, a means of measurement. The artist is still responsible for the conception, and it requires great skill to overcome the technical problems."

"The Great Wall" - a chronological array of color reproductions of hundreds of antique paintings - allowed Hockney to pinpoint the technological advance of lenses and mirrors to around 1420.

Receding space

Near that time, the Italian architects Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti gave methodical expression to perspective, which allowed painters to build illusions of deeply receding space from then on. Western painting remained fixated on that one-eyed view until Picasso and others challenged it in the early 20th century.

The exhibition also will build on Hockney's earlier work involving a Polaroid camera. In the 1970s, he used the camera to make big, composite images from small, partially overlapping, partially divergent snapshots, achieving something like cubist photography. A shuffle between drawing, painting and photography has characterized his work ever since, to the point where distinctions between originals and reproductions matter to him less than ever.

Based on his experience with the Polaroid collages, Hockney has begun making videos using banks of small cameras. The results he gets - which will command a lot of space at the de Young - expand the kinetic viewing experience in almost indescribable ways.

It's yet another experiment in a long career of them, and he isn't finished yet.

"I never wanted to make a movie," he said. "But now - now that I can use nine cameras, 20 cameras - I'm interested."